


Host

by Neelh



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Depression, Gen, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 18:51:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4490793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neelh/pseuds/Neelh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grief and growing and a parasite that just won't leave them alone.</p>
<p>The Pines family is haunted by ghosts of the past, present, and future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Host

**Author's Note:**

> There's a lot of sensitive material in here, and I might have missed some in the tags. Sorry.

**1 (stanley pines a)**

 

He remembers being Stanley.

He was happy at first, if he ignores the fact that his father barely acknowledged him, that his brother got hurt by bullies, that he had to be the strong twin. He tag-teamed growing up with Stanford; until he finally evolved into a parasite on his brother’s life. Stanley was the stupid twin, the dumb muscle, the one who chased girls but would drop everything for Ford. His very existence must be draining Stanford, but he had ignored those invasive thoughts until he had finally broken Stanford’s perpetual motion machine, his ticket to college.

 

**2 (dipper pines a)**

 

“Pine Tree! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I just need a puppet again, and our deal is still on, right? That wasn’t really a question! I’m going to take your body anyway! Guess what! You don’t even have to leave your body anymore! Won’t that be fun?”

Dipper can’t speak. He tries to move his feet, to run, but his legs feel like lead, weighing him to the floor of his bedroom. Bill takes this silence as consent and dives into Dipper’s chest. He feels his conscious being pushed aside to make way for Bill, who gladly takes control of Dipper’s limbs.

“Wow! I forgot how great it feels to be in your body! Have you been working out, Pine Tree? And woah, you’ve got so much more energy than before! This feels great! I’m going to throw us down the stairs!”

Mabel is running up the stairs, though, and Dipper’s body crashes into her. She gets knocked backwards and Dipper keeps on hearing cracking noises as they tumble down together. Suddenly, Dipper gets ejected from his body, and he sees Bill fly out a few seconds later.

“Dipper!” Mabel shouts, dragging herself towards him with her bleeding arms. “Dipper, your neck… Dipper!”

“Well, kid, the jig’s up! I guess you’ll wake up in a minute, but until then, let’s see Shooting Star cry over the inevitable!” Bill’s voice is loud and brash over Mabel’s quiet sobs of disbelief and grief. “I like you, kid, which is why I gave you a warning! I’ll be back, and until then, I’ll be keeping an eye on you!”

Dipper wakes up with a scream.

 

**3 (stanford pines a)**

 

He is the smart one. Where his brother is brash and loud, he is quiet, reserved, and analytical. He can solve problems with logic, thinking where his brother perceives, judging where his brother feels.

That is who he is. Where Stanley is the strength of the two, muscle and emotional support, Stanford can point towards the best path for them. They are both two extremes; needing nobody but each other, balancing their interests and needs in a perfect way.

But Stanford adds his future to their scales, and they tip.

There are doors open to Stanford that are not to Stanley, and until this moment, Stanford went nowhere without his brother. They were two and the same, but Stanford was beginning to realise that was a lie.

He was always different. He was the one with the brains and nothing else.

His first failure isn’t even his own, and it brings humiliation and fury.

He screams at his brother, because he has never needed to release anger before and he doesn’t know how, so carrying out some form of justice works. And justice is achieved but it won’t bring back what he has lost.

 

**4 (stanley pines b)**

 

Sometimes he ruminates on life. What is there to it except self-hatred and disappointment? Giving up would mean weakness, and weakness means defeat, and he is not allowed to be defeated.

But living starts to feel like defeat, and when he fights to stay alive, it doesn’t feel like he’s on his own side anymore. His feet drag behind him as he exists in a permanent state of melancholia. The idea of happiness that he thrived in during his youth becomes a distant memory, like a fuzzy dream from years ago, like substances that created false emotions. Stanley Pines lives in a world of his own, where everything is grey and everything tastes of cardboard.

Stanley Pines buys a bottle of whiskey and drives to a cliff. He drinks it all and gets in his car and prepares to drive himself off the edge. But he is too cowardly, and doesn’t know whether to count that as a victory or a failure.

 

**5 (mabel pines a)**

 

She is thirteen when she no longer finds the magic in playing with her stuffed toys. They don’t have the life that she used to find in them, but she consistently makes stories with them, trying to put some of her own endless energy into them, but it feels like they’re corpses.

Mabel tries to connect with little kids on the climbing fame that she used to try to scale with great difficulty and can now clamber up in five seconds. They look at her with suspicion; they don’t let her join in their games of tag.

She doesn’t understand. Seventeen isn’t that old, isn’t it?

 

**6 (stanford pines b)**

 

He thinks about Stanley a lot. How he had said nothing as his brother was thrown to the sidewalk, how he had just turned away instead of defending Stanley like he was supposed to.

It was his damned pride, Stanford decides. He spends years in university realising that what he had done was reprehensible, and time in between those years and Gravity Falls trying to pluck up the courage to fix his mistakes.

But then he moves to the sleepy town of Gravity Falls, and his mind is occupied elsewhere. But whenever Stanford sees his reflection, he feels a deep pang of guilt in his gut.

 

**7 (mabel pines b)**

 

Mabel has to choose where she’s going for higher education.

Well, that’s not really true. She’s already decided that she’s going to take a gap year working at the Mystery Shack, and maybe if she feels like it, she’ll go to university later in her life. Right now, though, she is knitting the same ten sweater designs in five different sizes to sell online, because apparently people appreciate her skills.

The problem doesn’t lie in that fact, though. It is that she has to start taking care of herself, having a bank account, cooking nutritious meals, paying taxes if Grunkle Stan forgets to teach her how to commit tax fraud.

She has to be an adult.

 

**8 (stanford pines c)**

 

He sends for Stanley in a fit of fear and uncertainty. He has hidden the journals, and he is lying to himself when he believes that Bill – that _nobody_ – can find them.

He answers the door with a crossbow and he is ready to hurt whoever is there if they show even a hint of possession; if their eyes are the slightest bit off. He is a mess with uneven stubble and a half-clean suit, but so is Stanley, and Ford finds himself judging his brother in the back of his mind before he shakes himself out of it. Stanley is his brother. The one he trusts over everyone else.

A traitorous voice in the back of his mind that sounds suspiciously like Bill Cipher begins to speak up before Stanford silences it. He’s been hearing it an awful lot lately, along with the Shapeshifter’s, Fiddleford’s accented gibberish, and one that sounded like Stanley.

No, Stanley is right there, speaking. Ford chides himself for letting his guard down, and speaks to his brother. He doesn’t remember not to be condescending, but he is a genius locked away in a house built on his own ego and everyone else he has known for a long time has never been as smart as him. And Stanley is the one with muscles, the stupid one, and, Bill’s voice reminds him, _the one who ruined your life_.

Stanford doesn’t apologise. The words don’t even occur to him until it’s too late, and he has branded his brother and all he wants is for it to stop; for them to be twins again. Instead, he is thrown through the portal that symbolises his life’s work, and in his last moments, despite his misgivings, he throws the journal to Stanley.

 

**9 (dipper pines b)**

 

Dipper screams in his sleep.

Mabel knows precisely when he is going to have a nightmare. It begins with Dipper stirring under the sheets, his eyes moving rapidly behind his eyelids. Then the whimpering starts, before turning into sobs, and Mabel tries to wake him up.

“Dipper? Dipper, it’s a bad dream, wake up,” she hisses, crawling onto his bed next to him and shaking his arms. Eventually, she moves on to screaming his name and slapping his face. “ _Dipper_! Wake up, you idiot!”

Sometimes, Dipper’s eyes open wide and he clutches his sister, whispering words like  “ _Thank goodness, Mabel, I thought he’d hurt you_ ,”or “ _I thought you were_ …” or, Mabel’s least favourite out of all of the sounds that she hates, Dipper’s breaking, broken voice sobbing “ _Mabel_ ,” over and over again. Once, she thinks she hears him confess, “ _I killed you, Mabel. I killed you and I enjoyed it_.” She writes that one off as a hallucination brought on by the sleepless nights.

But tonight, he doesn’t wake up, and Mabel knows that Bill has him completely now. There is no escape from the nightmares. Waddles flees the room to a quieter part of the house, and Mabel wishes that she could do the same, but the one time that she did, Bill had made the dream so real that Dipper really thought that she was… That she wasn’t there anymore. When Mabel realised that his screams were no longer caused by nightmares, she rushed to his room to see him clutching her pillow. The look of relief and fear on his face then could have killed her.

His voice sometimes wears out from all of the screaming in terror, but it’s not as common as the words that rush from his mouth in one-sided conversations.

Statements like, “ _Mabel, no, are you okay? Please be okay, please be okay, please be okay_ …”

Statements like, “ _Please, please don’t hurt Grunkle Stan! You have the journals, you have my body, please, just leave_!”

Statements like, “ _I’ll do anything, you can torture me all you want, I give up, just please, stop hurting them_.”

And after all of that, Dipper, in a hoarse and broken voice, chokes out, “ _Kill me_.”

And from the relief that slides onto his face in the few moments before he wakes up, Mabel’s heart breaks.

 

**10 (stanley pines c)**

 

He has a purpose now. He has to get his brother back from the other side of the portal.

Stanley is stupid and useless, but he needs to get this to work. Damn it, if he has to trample over his brother’s name by turning his home into a tourist trap and posing as the man, he will at least pretend to be as smart as Stanford was.

Of course, he never will be, but he is stubborn and for once, he is not conflicted on something. His brother is worth everything, and Stanley will learn, with live, will die for him.

This probably isn’t healthy, but Stanley is a madman with grimy, ill-fitting clothes and a burn on his back that is probably infected, so he was never really a role model in the first place.

Still, just in case all of that changes, he keeps a gun and some bullets in a desk drawer.

 

**11 (dipper pines c)**

 

“Are you okay?” Stanley asks his great-niece.

She shrugs, rubbing at her dull, sleep-deprived eyes. “It was better than normal. Bill got bored around one o’clock, so we got some sleep.”

He envelops her in a hug, trying to communicate sympathy and pride, because Mabel is so much better than him, because while she comforts and helps her brother as he screams the house down, when Stanley hears his brother, sleeping in the basement directly underneath him, yelling curses and the name _Bill Cipher_ in his sleep, the old man adjusts his earplugs and tries to go back to sleep.

 

**12 (stanford pines d)**

 

When Stanford returns from the portal, he releases his anger yet again on his brother. In his head, he tries to rationalise it, but the truth is that his fury has blinded him. He has no purpose in those moments except to cause as much pain on other people in the blind hope that it may get rid of his own.

He calms down when he sees the children, not wanting them to see his worse side. First impressions are important, he knows.

But as the minutes tick on and his mind starts to work rationally again, his mind puts more information together. Stanley fixed the portal alone, without anything to go from but the first journal and Stanford’s rants as his sanity drifted further away.

The portal literally required rocket science to be opened. Stanley was even smarter than Ford, who had needed outside help and funding, while Stanley managed to do everything except finding the journals alone, and even then collecting the other two without being noticed or put under suspicion was a ridiculously difficult feat.

But in order to get his brother back, Stanley had become the better twin; the smarter twin; the stronger twin. He wasn’t dumb muscle anymore. He was a fiercely intelligent and able man who no longer needed his twin brother at his side to point out problems and share adventures with. Stanley is the better twin, Ford realises.

Stanford had been the smart one, once. The one who knew what he was doing and could guide his twin in the same way. Now that his sibling had surpassed all expectations, Ford didn’t know what to do with himself.

 

**13 (dipper pines d)**

 

Grunkle Stan is nowhere to be found, and Great-Uncle Ford can’t cook to save his life. Dipper isn’t going to trust Mabel to make anything unless he wants to be coughing up glitter for the rest of the summer, so Dipper is going to make dinner.

The chicken nuggets are in the oven and he is adding milk to the potatoes when he hears a familiar laugh.

“Bill? Show yourself!” he says, backing away into a corner and brandishing the potato masher like a weapon. The laughter stops as suddenly as it began and Dipper stands still for what feels like an hour before he dares to move again, and mashes the potatoes much more quietly. Mabel’s giggles and Waddles’s oinking from outside drift to his ears, and he takes comfort in his sister’s existence. Bill will never touch them if Dipper can say anything about it.

He sets the table. Knife, fork, spoon, knife, fork, spoon, knife fork spoon, knife fork spoon and the urge to take the cutlery and pierce his skin repeatedly, leaving the handles hanging out of his arm like blood-encrusted baubles, it takes him over and he feels Bill; feels his laughter and sadomasochism. Bill is there, and he cannot control his limbs but there are sensations of gripping and hurting and he keeps hearing _Pine Tree Pine Tree Pine Tree_.

“Dipper! _Dipper_!”

_Pine Tree Pine Tree Pine Tree_

“Dipper, he’s not there, he can’t hurt you! Calm down!”

_Pine Tree Pine Tree Pine Tree_

“Hey, Shooting Star!” he feels himself say, and there is no Bill, he’s alone in his body, and his limbs feel weak and _Pine Tree Pine Tree_ -

“Mabel!”

He grips her arms, and she looks at him in horror. Great-Uncle Ford is standing behind her, holding bandages and antiseptic.

“Where’s Bill? Where did he go? Did you get rid of him again, Mabel?” he says, words gushing out of his mouth like vomit. She doesn’t reply, and Dipper’s face contorts with worry. “Mabel, _is Bill still here_?”

Mabel shakes her head, her mouth hanging open a little in horror and her hands shaking. “No, Dipper,” she replies, her voice quivering. “He was never there to begin with.”


End file.
